I spent four years as Forbes' Girl Friday, which to me meant doing a little bit of everything at once. As a member of the Forbes Entrepreneurs team, I looked at booming business and startup life with a female gaze. I worked on the PowerWomen Wealth and Celebrity 100 lists, keeping my ears pricked and pen poised for current event stories--from political sex scandals to celebrity gossip to international affairs. In 2012 I helped to put two South American women on the cover of FORBES Magazine: Modern Family star Sofia Vergara (the top-earning actress on U.S. television) and Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, who is transforming the BRIC nation into an entrepreneurial powerhouse. Prior to Forbes I was at the Philadelphia CityPaper, where I learned more than any girl ever needs to know about the city's seedier trades. I studied digital journalism at The University of The Arts.
I left Forbes in November, 2013, to pursue other interests on the West Coast.

How Women In Tech Are Losing From Top To Bottom

According to a new survey the number of women in senior technology positions at U.S. companies is down for the second year in a row.

The survey, published by U.S. division of the British tech recruitment group Harvey Nash, attests that just 9% of U.S. chief information officers (CIOs) are female, down from 11% last year and 12% in 2010. According to Reuters, 30% of the 450 American tech executives polled said their IT groups have no women at all in management positions. What’s more, when the same group of executives was asked whether women were underrepresented, roughly one half said no.

Which, I concede, is all bad news for women. To the boy’s club of CIOs in America, women aren’t around and nobody seems to have a problem with it.

But I do. I think it’s wrong and bad and exactly the attitude that’s keeping women from earning anything close to our brothers, boyfriends and husbands. But that’s not what this post is about.

This post is about whether surveys and research like this are bad for women in another way: whether they’re looking at women in tech with a set of blinders on. Determined to find some good in the ongoing conversation about the black hole for women that is the tech debate, I set about looking to prove that this latest research was misrepresenting women in technology by only looking at a particular group of companies at the top.

Unfortunately, as Bob Miano, President and CEO of Harvey Nash USA soon filled me in on, I was wrong. His isn’t a study that looks only at the 500 most profitable companies in America, but rather a sampling of over 450 companies that range from Silicon Valley startups to “a large computer software company with three letters in its name.” And of these companies, fewer than 40 chief information officers were female.

In terms of women at the top, at least, the reports of decline are verified. But what’s worse, where I had hoped that the recent blizzard of startup activity might be helping to change the ratio in favor of the fairer sex, Miano says the opposite is true. He blames the decline in women in tech roles on the uptick of startup companies, which he says tend to be less interested in diversity than many of his older, more established clients who often put major emphasis on recruiting female talent.

But as a woman who covers women for a living, I know anecdotally that this research is not indicative of the number of girls, women, ladies I meet every week who are kicking tech’s butt in the startup world. I look at companies like Joyus and Fab, both highly funded ventures with women leading their tech teams. I look at women like Caterina Fake, Allyson Kapin and programs like Black Girls Code and Women 2.0. I look at numbers that say women are starting businesses at 1.5 times the national average.

This is an issue that has plagued us for too long, says Tara Hunt, CEO of Buyosphere, “Even though we’re seeing an increase in the numbers of women enrolling and graduating college with technical degrees. And even though there is an upswing in women joining and launching startups, we are quite far from parity. The more women we see in high profile technical roles at these companies, the more young women will be inspired to pursue a career in technology.”

True, despite the fact that women have reached senior positions at Facebook, Xerox, Oracle and other large companies, they’re hardly the norm.

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They are ! check out what Joyce Kim (@simplehoney) and Brit Morin (@weduary) are doing… and Carine Magescas with @angelpad.. Victoria Ransom (a good Kiwi girl) with @widlfireapp and of course me (@scrattch) :)

The rise in women-founded tech startups seems logical from a cost-benefit perspective: If an established organization doesn’t hire you into a career-track position within a year after graduation, then the odds of successfully competing with the latest wave of graduates aren’t favorable. The opportunity costs in terms of lost income and lost promotion potential are significantly reduced, and so why not start your own business if you have a somewhat original-yet-tenable business model and appropriate social capital?

Thank you for the article. From a consultant’s point of view, I wonder if this is a problem of outputs (e.g., women in top tech jobs) or inputs (e.g., women graduating from STEM and other incubators of tech talent)?

If the % of women in top tech jobs (9%) was somewhat analogous to the % of women graduating from STEM jobs, then you might argue that tech is actually more of a meritocracy that other industries. Do you have the % of women graduating from STEM undergrad and grad degrees? Seems like that is an essential piece of the puzzle. Many thanks.

Interesting article. One characterization of tech firms that came to mind is the “Mad Men of the 21st century.” The causal explanation of the gender gap in tech firms and business in general appears to lie in the gender gaps in college majors. Take a look at these statistics: http://blogs.payscale.com/ask_dr_salary/2009/12/do-men-or-women-choose-majors-to-maximize-income.html

Now, the article is interesting itself, but the statistics are more of the focal point here.

As a graduate student, I have become more aware of the gender gap in higher education. My discipline’s gender ratio, for instance, is horrible, and many have been trying to figure out what the underlying cause of the disparity is. Beyond my own area of study, I also noticed how poor the ratio of men to women is in mathematics, engineering, computer science and physics. These disciplines are heavily male dominated, but they are also highly employable areas of study. Thus, there is a cause-and-effect relation between the intended field of study and the projection of men and women into the “real world.”

So the post-education gender disparities are reducible to the gender disparities in higher education—particularly in majors. What the exact cause(s) and the prescribed measures to remedy the situation are not easy questions to answer. But I suggest that higher education is the place to look for the root of the problem.

9% sounds really low. But a CIO of a steel company may well be from the steel industry by design, etc How many technical women are in the steel industry, etc……? BTW, we lost one today when Ina Drew resigned from JMP.